The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

by Mark Bowden

  The Body in Room 348

  Vanity Fair, May 2013

  Greg Fleniken traveled light and lived tidy. After so many years on the road, he would leave his rolling suitcase open on the floor of his hotel room and use it as a drawer. Dirty clothes went on the closet floor. Shirts he wanted to keep unwrinkled hung above. Toiletries were in the pockets of a cloth folding case that hooked onto a towel rack in the bathroom. At the end of the day he would slide off his worn brown leather boots and line them up by the suitcase, drop his faded jeans to the floor, and put on lightweight cotton pajama bottoms.

  Most evenings he never left the room. He would crank up the air-conditioning—he liked a cool room at night—and sit on the bed, leaning back on two pillows propped against the headboard. Considerately, to avoid soiling the bedspread, he would lay out a clean white hand towel, on which he placed his ashtray, cigarette pack, lighter, BlackBerry, the TV remote, and a candy bar. He smoked and broke off candy bits while watching TV. This is what Greg was doing on the evening of Wednesday, September 15, 2010, in room 348 of the MCM Eleganté Hotel in Beaumont, Texas—lounging, smoking, snacking on a Reese’s Crispy Crunchy bar, sipping root beer, and watching Iron Man 2.

  He missed the ending.

  Greg was accustomed to solitary nights. As a young man he had worked as a chief engineer on oceangoing vessels, spending months at sea. In middle age he had reinvented himself as a landman, a familiar occupation in South Texas, easing the exploitation of mineral rights on private property for gas and oil companies. Slender, with a close-cropped white beard and the weathered skin of a lifelong outdoorsman, he had partnered with his brother, Michael, in a thriving oil-land leasing business based in this small city east of Houston. Every Monday morning he would make the two-hour drive in his pickup from Lafayette, Louisiana, heading west on Interstate 10 through scruffy Gulf Coast farmland broken only by cell-phone towers, oil derricks, and billboards advertising motel chains and bayou restaurants, “Adult Superstores,” and other local attractions. It took him through the stink of the big ConocoPhillips refinery at Lake Charles, a forest of piping, giant tanks, and towering chimneys. The hotel was just off the cloverleaf outside of Beaumont. He made the same drive in the opposite direction every Friday. His home in Lafayette was more in the style of New Orleans than Texas oil country, a small stone château with outbuildings around a shady courtyard, a place his mother had built to house her antique store, and which she had operated as a bed-and-breakfast. The antiques business was gone, but Greg’s wife, Susie, still rented rooms. It was a home rich with style and character—in contrast to the Eleganté, a step up from the standard roadside lodging but a small one. His company rented him a room in the three-story “cabana” wing, which wrapped around a small swimming pool framed with potted palms.

  That Wednesday night, watching his movie, Greg got an e-mail from Susie shortly after seven. She was using a computer program to file for a tax extension. After she reported her progress, he wrote back, “You’re doin’ good, Babe.”

  At some point during the loud, computer-generated showdown at the end of his film, amid all the fake violence, Greg was struck from nowhere with a very real and shattering blow—a blow so violent it would blind a man with pain. He might have heard at the same time a loud pop but was hardly in any condition in those critical seconds to sort out what had happened. He managed to get off the bed and move toward the door before he fell face-first, legs splayed.

  He was probably dead by the time his face hit the green rug.

  The following morning, Susie Fleniken called Greg’s office. Husband and wife usually spoke every morning, but he hadn’t called. He wasn’t answering his phone. When he failed to turn up at the office, two of his coworkers drove over to the hotel and knocked on his door.

  There was no answer, so they got the hotel manager to open it. Their alarmed calls brought an ambulance and the Beaumont police. They found a middle-aged man dead on the rug, prone, with a spent cigarette cupped delicately between two stiff fingers of his left hand. Room 348 was stuffy and exceptionally warm. The man’s skin color had gone grayish blue. There was a dark wet spot at the crotch of his blue pajama pants, but that wasn’t unusual.

  Detective Scott Apple showed up a little more than an hour later. He is a short and very fit man with graying hair that he wears combed straight up, in spikes. He is all cop. His wife had been a cop; he met her on the job. He was one of the assault-team leaders on the department’s SWAT team—one those men who never stops working.

  But there was little here to interest Apple. No sign of a breakin or struggle. Nothing disturbed in the room. No blood or obvious wounds. Fleniken’s wallet was still in the back pocket of his discarded jeans and had a stack of hundred-dollar bills in it, so robbery wasn’t a motive. Those staying in nearby rooms had heard nothing. As Apple questioned the neighbors, he told them it was probably a “natural-causes thing.” Sad. He poked around in Fleniken’s bags, looking mostly for pills, some clue to his collapse. There were none. Susie and Michael later told him that Greg never went to a doctor. He was a stubbornly independent man, suspicious of authority and unmoved by the modern passion for health and fitness. He did not exercise. He had chain-smoked his entire adult life and had the nagging cough to prove it. He neither drank nor ate to excess, but he did both freely. It was easy to conclude that his choices had simply caught up to him.

  Susie was ready to believe it. She was shocked and grief-stricken, but she accepted that, for Greg, sudden death was a possibility. In fact, she took some solace in it. He had checked out on his own terms. Many times she had heard him remark, upon hearing of someone dying suddenly, “Lucky bastard. That’s how I want to go.”

  And so he had.

  At the hotel, the police saw the death as routine. A photographer snapped pictures to make a record of the scene, and the body was driven by a transport service to the office of the Jefferson County medical examiner for an autopsy. The only mystery here appeared to be medical, and it was likely a minor mystery at that.

  Dr. Tommy Brown had a time-tested method. It took him forty-five minutes to conduct a postmortem exam, inspecting a body inside and out, measuring and weighing organs, all the while describing what he found and noting the metrics that fleshed out the official form. When he worked with a detective alongside, he would explain what he was seeing step-by-step and what he could deduce from what he saw. He was all business, crisp, efficient, and confident. He did everything fast; he even talked fast. After Brown retired, a year later, the new firm that took his place routinely took three hours to do the same procedure. Some would credit this to stricter standards, but there was also an argument to be made for experience. The doctor was thin and bald on top and had a spray of unruly white hair that enhanced his mad-scientist image. He was a local character, part of the legal landscape in Jefferson County, and a respected one. Where death was concerned, in this corner of Texas, Dr. Tommy Brown’s word was law.

  The circumstances of the man’s death, as reported, were unremarkable. On the table before him was a fifty-five-year-old Caucasian male who appeared to be in decent shape. After methodical inspection, the only marks Brown found on the body were a one-inch abrasion on the man’s left cheek, where his face had hit the rug, and, curiously, a half-inch laceration of his scrotum. This was interesting. The sack itself was swollen and discolored, and around the wound was a small amount of edema fluid. The bruising around it had spread up through the groin area and across the right hip. Something had hit him hard.

  The story his innards told was startling and intriguing. When Brown opened the front of the torso he discovered a surprising amount of blood and extensive internal damage. A small quantity of partly digested food had been torn from the intestines. The doctor found small lacerations there and on the stomach and liver, as well as two broken ribs, and a hole torn through the right side of the heart.

  The condition of the man’s insides reflected severe trauma: it suggested that Fleniken had been beaten to d
eath or crushed. Brown concluded that the wound to his genitals likely had been caused by a hard kick. He had also taken a blow to the chest so severe it had caused lethal damage. He would have bled out internally in less than thirty seconds.

  On the official form, next to “Manner of Death,” Brown wrote, “Homicide.”

  When he got this surprising news, Detective Apple called Brown immediately for an explanation. The doctor told him that the man in room 348 had suffered the kind of severe internal injuries he was more used to seeing in crash victims or in someone found crushed under a heavy fallen object.

  There are not that many murders in Beaumont. Greg’s was one of ten that year, which was about average. Most are not mysterious. Detective work was usually a matter of doing the obvious—interviewing the drunk boyfriend with gunpowder on his hands, or finding the neighborhood drug dealer who was owed money. A case like this was a once-in-a-career event. If you enjoy working a stubborn whodunit, which Apple does, then this one presented an exciting challenge. But the problem with the hard cases is that they are, indeed, hard. They can mean a lot of toil that leads nowhere. Apple is a dogged worker and a good investigator. He had plenty of experience, and unlike many cops who have been on the job for years, he cared. He had professional pride and real empathy for the victim’s family and loved ones. Apple welcomed the responsibility. Over the next weeks and months, he chased down every angle he could imagine to explain the death of Greg Fleniken. It challenged him intellectually and emotionally. But about six months into it, he was stuck.

  The physical evidence didn’t add up. Unless Greg had been beaten to death elsewhere, and his body had been returned to the room and carefully placed on the rug, nothing about the scene added up to a violent crime. How does a man get beaten so severely about the stomach and chest that ribs crack, inner organs tear, and his heart ruptures, all without significant exterior damage to his torso? Other than the bruising and the cut at his crotch, Fleniken’s outer body showed no signs of a beating. And how could such a rumble have taken place in the hotel room without a thing being toppled or even disturbed? Without anyone in adjacent rooms hearing a thing?

  Video from the hotel’s various surveillance cameras offered no obvious clues. Fleniken was observed arriving at the hotel that evening but not leaving, and there was no sign from video of the outer doors or elevators of a body being carried back in. Whatever had happened to him had happened there, on the third floor of the cabana wing. Perhaps the beating had taken place outside the room in the hall, but there were no cameras in the hallway to provide evidence.

  And there was no answer to the all-important question: Why? Greg appeared to have had no enemies. Apple talked a lot to Susie. She had been in her twenties, a singer in a rock band, when she met Greg. She clearly adored him. She was a delightfully offbeat Southern belle, buxom and pretty and warm, and oh so deferential but also, in that time-honored Southern way, stubborn as a tick. She was heartbroken and furious at the same time. Greg was the nicest man she had ever met. He was so nice, she had married him twice—first when they were kids, and then, after parting ways for a number of years, again in middle age. When Susie first called him again after that separation, he’d said, “I’ve been waiting for you to call.” They had been married the second time for fifteen years. He was honest and ornery and easy and, as Susie saw him, utterly lovable. He was so genuine that he found it hard to lie about anything. When they were home together, and she was trying to nap, and the phone rang, she would say, “Don’t answer.” But he would answer, and he could not bring himself to cover for her, to say, “She’s not here.” He would tell her, apologetically, “I can’t lie. I don’t lie.” In the weeks after his death, and after Brown’s startling finding, she would ask plaintively, “Who would kill the nicest, most nonthreatening, most truthful man in the world?”

  Greg’s brother and coworkers said that he had been universally liked in their company and had no history of any run-ins with colleagues or employees. He was not the sort of man who sought confrontation. When someone had to be laid off or fired, he left the unpleasant task to someone else. There was nothing irregular about him. His life at the Eleganté rarely intersected with anyone else’s. He went to his room early in the evening and usually stayed there by himself until morning. Often he ordered room service, a club sandwich and a root beer, and ate in his room. Apple interviewed bartenders, waitstaff, and management. Greg had never been seen down at the bar. He did not get in arguments or fights. He did not socialize or drink or pick up women. There was no evidence of relationships with anyone who worked at or frequented the hotel. On the few occasions when Apple was told he had been seen with a woman, the witnesses invariably described Susie.

  So this was not a drunk. This was not a philanderer or a man who got into fights. This was a decent, honorable, smart, and successful man whom people liked. The sort of man nobody would murder—yet someone had. Someone had beaten him until his ribs cracked and his heart burst. Through the fall and into the winter of 2010, Apple pursued a number of possibilities. Maintenance records showed that at some point early in the evening of his death, while cooking prepackaged popcorn in the microwave, Greg had inadvertently blown an electrical circuit. The outage had affected the adjacent room, 349, and the rooms directly underneath. Greg had called the front desk to report the outage, and had confessed his role sheepishly to the worker who came up to reset the breaker.

  This led to two theories.

  The first involved sex. The Eleganté maintenance man who had come to Greg’s room happened to have a rap sheet as a sex offender. Might the puncture wound to the scrotum and the internal injuries have been caused by a long screwdriver—during some sort of bizarre and kinky assault? Apple spent a lot of time talking to the maintenance man and looking into his background, checking out his story of that night, and scrutinizing the time line. Nothing out of the ordinary came up, and this theory never advanced beyond wild suspicion.

  The second theory involved a group of union electricians staying at the Eleganté, a number of whom had been in the room next door, room 349, on the night Greg died. They were in town for an extended stay, doing a job for an oil company. At night they tended to assemble in one another’s rooms to drink. What if some of them had been partying next door when the electricity went out? Might one or more of them have knocked on Greg’s door and, perhaps drunk and annoyed, exchanged words with and then assaulted him in the hallway? Could Greg, badly beaten, have returned to his room and then collapsed? Some of the electricians had been questioned on the day the body was found, when Apple considered the death to have been of natural causes, and none said they had any interaction with the man in 348.

  Nine days after Greg’s death, armed with this new understanding of how he had died, Apple and a colleague returned to the third floor of the cabana wing to question some of the same men again. This time he came with suspicion. He was wearing a hidden video camera. The electricians were friendly and appropriately curious.

  “What happened to that guy, anyway?” asked Lance Mueller, a sharp-featured man with dark, thinning hair, dressed in a T-shirt and blue jeans, who was still staying in room 349, along with a roommate, Tim Steinmetz.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” Apple said, honestly. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. It was almost like something fell on him or something. We’re just trying to see if somebody heard something or maybe if somebody knows somebody who heard something, or maybe if somebody messed with him.”

  “You’re trying to figure it out,” said Mueller.

  “Yeah,” said Apple.

  Mueller and Steinmetz had nothing to offer. The two electricians said they had heard the man in the next room coughing when they had returned from the bar late that night, but they had no clue what had killed him. Mueller seemed as confused as Apple was about the idea of something crushing him.

  “There’s nothing in these rooms heavy enough,” he said.

  Down the hall, they found three more of the electr
icians—Trent Pasano, Thomas Elkins, and Scott Hamilton. The men were friendly and tried to be helpful. One said that when he had seen the body on a gurney in the elevator, he had first assumed it was caterers delivering a cake or a big food tray.

  “That’s a better thought,” said Apple.

  “I thought he died of a heart attack,” said Pasano, who said he had been in the room with Mueller and Steinmetz that night but had not seen or heard anything unusual.

  “That’s what we thought,” said Apple. “It looks like something fell on him.”

  Nothing. The electricians handed over their driver’s licenses and gave Apple their cell-phone numbers. They would be in town for a few more months, if anything came up. Happy to help.

  Weeks went by. Months went by. Apple worked any theory he could imagine. He considered the possibility that Susie had had her husband killed, and thought about looking into Greg’s insurance arrangements. Seizing Susie’s computer or phone records would have meant getting a search warrant and then working things out with Louisiana authorities, but that would have demanded probable cause, which he did not have. He considered Michael Fleniken, Greg’s brother and partner. Might he have had some motive? There was nothing that even hinted at it. Could Greg have gotten in a car accident on the way to the hotel? Had he been accosted on the street and beaten up some time before? There was no evidence for any of these conjectures.

  Apple did get one exciting break. He had a friend at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), who agreed to have Greg’s BlackBerry analyzed. Printouts of its calling record were delivered, showing the phone numbers of top-dollar prostitution rings, outfits that matched hookers with johns over the Internet. What if Greg had arranged to rendezvous with a prostitute and things had gone wrong? Killed during kinky sex? Killed by an angry pimp? Apple wasn’t eager to explore this angle with Susie, but she kept calling him, asking what was going on. As this was the only thing he had, he finally told her about it. Susie was upset. She was also adamant. That was not her Greg.